Archive
Every post, going back to 2005.
2026
Note: The blog had no new posts from 2013 to 2025.
2012
2011
- Just Follow the Signs...
- Nuclear Weapons and Murphy’s Law
- “One Good Turn” by Witold Rybczynski
- Changing Gears
- CNET Intelligent Cross-Sell @ RichRelevance
- My Perestroika
- Review: “A Crack in the Edge of the World” by Simon Winchester
- Friends and Strangers
- The Long and Short of Average Sentence Length
- Citizen U.S.A.
- The Use and Abuse of the Em Dash
- Revew: “Sum” by David Eagleman
- Dreaming FIDS
- Edward Tufte’s ET Modern Gallery
- Correlation Exploration
- Counterintuitive College Rankings
- Review: “The Yugo” by Jason Vuic
- How Pizza Hut Got Its Name
- A Lot from a Little: Otomata and Generative Music
- Review: “The Mom & Pop Store” by Robert Spector
- Misguidedly Different
- Review: “Genghis Khan, Modern Man” by Jack Weatherford
- Salesforce.com Competitive Mischief
- Review: “Behind the Cloud” by Marc Benioff
- Earmarks Away
- Review: “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” by Kamkwamba and Mealer
- Enjoy Every Sandwich (Watson on Jeopardy)
- Pig 05049
- Let There Not Be Light
- Decision-Making in the American Revolutionary War
- Review: “Washington’s Crossing” by David Hackett Fischer
- Banksy Breaks the Frame
2010
- “Re-projection: Hoosac” by Tobias Putrih
- Review: “Illumination in the Flatwoods” by Joe Hutto
- States with Places with English Names (or, How Much More English is New England?)
- John Adams Puts John Cage In Context
- Ham the Astrochimp
- Review: “Wooden Boats” by Michael Ruhlman
- Waiting for Superman
- Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings at MASS MoCA
- Wildlife Documentaries Exposed?
- Does the Future of Testing Need Tests?
- Review: “The Good Soldiers” by David Finkel
- The Ultimate Niche Business
- Warren Buffett versus The Efficient Market Hypothesis
- America the Start-Up
- Grading Teachers Based on Their Students’ Test Scores
- The Fates of Wristwatches and Email
- Lessons from “Million-Dollar Murray”
- Two By David Grann
- The Six Million Dollar Turkey?
- The Wisdom of Water Towers
- Charter Cities
- Review: “The Size of Thoughts” by Nicholson Baker
- “Square with Four Circles”: More Interesting Than It Sounds ; )
- Give Data, Get Stuff: Always Present and Evolving
- Congratulations, West Hartford!
- Review: “Dirt” by David Montgomery
- Engage and Persuade: San Francisco Cabbie Edition
- Owl Pellets Again?
- The Owl Pellet Economy
- Privacy Noise
- Review: “The Quants” by Scott Patterson
- iPad: It’s Not Your Father’s Apple II
- Common Sense versus the Uncommon Situation
- Worm Grunting
- Review: “A Sense of the World” by Jason Roberts
- Copy and Paste Provenance
- Microattention for Secondary Screens
- Review: “The Fourth Star” by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe
- When Reporters Don’t Want to Hear It
- Review: “A History of the World in 6 Glasses” by Tom Standage
- The Power of the Portfolio: VCs and Entrepreneurs
- Coding for an Audience
- Review: “Coders at Work” by Peter Seibel
- Recovering Energy from Shock Absorbers (Levant Power)
- Review: “Invictus” by John Carlin
2009
- Review: “Fargo Rock City” by Chuck Klosterman
- “The Bloomberg of Wind” (Wind Pole Ventures)
- Full-Circle Guitar
- A Building to Behold: Yale’s Beinecke Library
- Review: “Blind Man’s Bluff” by Sontag and Drew
- Popularity of Words for Numbers
- Onomatopoeia for Books (“The Twitter Book” by O’Reilly and Milstein)
- Review: “Chasing the Flame” by Samantha Power
- Negative-Space Pumpkin
- Our Greatest Animal Menace?
- Review: “The Origin of Wealth” by Eric Beinhocker
- A Quick Spin with Google App Engine
- The Arbitrary Precision of a Close Finish
- Does the Future of TV Have Two Screens?
- Woe is GDP
- 21st Century Family Photo
- On Twitter
- The Good Old Days, Inflation-Adjusted
- Review: “The Great Siege: Malta 1565” by Ernle Bradford
- 1919 Penny
- Proactive Safety from Flight Data
- Weird, Wonderful Comerç 24
- Penetration Confusion
- Ondák’s “Measuring the Universe”
- Too Many Italian Restaurants?
- Data-Mining 1.6 Million Putts for Irrationality
- New York City’s High Line
- Trademarkery
- Meaningful Numbers on Commuter-Airline Safety
- Spread the Word: “Affordance”
- Review: “100 Years of Change” by George Friedman
- Truth from the Technical Trenches
- Hyundai Assurance
- Managing by Measuring the Right Things
- “Stop Talking and Let the Students Learn to Learn”
- Bubble Fuel
- Geeks Bearing Formulas
- When Dishwasher Displays Attack
- Making User Ratings Add Up
- From Newspapers to News
- Theory and Practice of “Customer Focused”
- On Colophons
- Engagement with Learning at MIT
- What Can You Learn from 40 Million Resumes?
- Turbulence Ball
- How Big is a Trillion?
- The Risky Business of “Value at Risk”
2008
- Understanding 0.02 Parts per Billion
- Tidal Waves Are Not Tidal
- Review: “Super Crunchers” by Ian Ayres
- Art Auctions’ Self-Serving Numbers
- SVD for You and Me
- Water-Based Data Centers
- Review: “Gaming the Vote” by William Poundstone
- October Surprise or Ambiguous Reference?
- Different Ways to Do Percentage Differences
- The Wandering Albatross
- The Evolution of Children’s TV
- Points, Percentages, and Stock-Market Plunges
- Megapixels Begone (Comparative Metrics That Won’t Go Away)
- Inverse Out-of-Office Message
- The Metrics of High Gas Prices
- How Not To Do Customer Service
- Enlightening about Lightning
- Review: “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely
- Social Norms versus Market Norms in Daycare
- What Is a Vegetable?
- The State Motto Grotto
- John Gruber’s “Daring Fireball”
- Zappos Makes It Pay to Quit
- Intelligent Cross-Sell at Office Depot
- Kindle and Amazon.com’s Big Thinking
- The Eric Carle Museum
- Cameras That Make Us Better
- When Stupid Isn’t: Product People Behind the Scenes
- Bill James Explains
- A Tale of Two On/Off Switches
- Rhetoric and the Visual Word
- Eastward
- Correcting for the Human Factor in Movie Ratings
- Errant Error Explanations
- Extracting That First Piece of Cake
- Airport Usability: Where Is My Baggage?
- “Is Disdain for Céline Dion Innate or Learned?”
2007
- Review: “The Genius of America” by Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes
- Mortenson and Relin’s “Three Cups of Tea”
- ExactChoice Epilogue: New CNET Recommenders
- XTC’s Go 2: “This is a Record Cover.”
- The Unmeasured Medium of Meetings
- Vampires versus Math
- Review: “How Computer Games Help Children Learn” by David Williamson Shaffer
- Customer Service Everywhere
- Analytics That Explain Themselves
- How to Hold a HiPPO
- Highway Exit Numbers: When Simple Was Too Simple
- Let It Roll, Baby, Roll
- The Pleasant Mystery of the Perfect Cut
- Walter Murch and the Long View of Film
- Bring on the New Magic
- Yield Management for Metered Street Parking
- Issues, Character, and Tuchman’s “The March of Folly”
- Outstanding in the Field
- The New York Times, Nielsen, and a Missing Margin of Error
- Is Predicting Hit Songs Futile?
- Do You Like What You Like Because You Like What I Like?
- The Joshua Bell Experiment
- Trojan Goldfish
- Misspelling for Profit
- A Reminder from Buffalo, NY, Circa 1886
- How Big Was That Squid?
- Why No Single-Letter Domains?
- E Ink: A Tale of Two Applications
- Throwing the Book at Sony’s Reader
- CMU’s TrafficSTATS
- Air Sickness Bag Collecting
2006
- Private Prediction Markets for Companies
- Tragedy and the Kindness of Strangers
- Bassmaster and the American Dream
- Stock-Price Milestones
- In Praise of the Apple Corer
- Election Night 2006 Graphics
- One Person, One Vote, Many Voting Systems
- loudQUIETloud: A film about the Pixies
- The Netflix Prize: Research Project as Product
- Review: “Organic, Inc.” by Samuel Fromartz
- Disney Gadget Magnetism
- Alaska’s Width
- CarMax Does Data Better
- Follow Up: Harvesting Power from Human Motion at Large Scale
- Piracy in Peru
- David Foster Wallace Serves It Up
- Wine Ratings: Drunk on Numbers?
- Vanity Sizing
- Old School Mash-Ups
- Sign Usability: San Francisco Does the Right Thing
- Why You Will Probably Outlive the Average Life Expectancy
- George Harrison, Pirate?
- Small Town Volunteerism
- By the Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s “People’s Choice”
- Data Visualization as Art
- Unexpected Numbers from the Economist’s “2006 Pocket World in Figures”
- Latitude with Attitude
- Wal-Mart and Economies of Density
- GM Gets Shifty With Numbers
- Rosum: A Down-to-Earth Version of GPS
- Dave Ibsen, Webby Winner
- Ormerod’s “Why Most Things Fail” and Schelling’s Segregation Models
- Back to the Land: Earthbound Farm Tours
- When is a Nutshell not a Nutshell?
- Hearing Glasses
- Where the U.S. Poverty-Rate Metric Came From
- Genetic Data’s Hammer and Nails
- Windows XP and Tivo: Don’t Confirm When You Can Undo
- News vs. Blogs: Mobile Distinctions
- Spoofing Your Way to the Next Big Thing
- When Counts and Percents Contradict
- Starbucks and the Meaning of Coffee
- Prosper and Zopa Bring the Business Model
- How Not To Use Numbers: High Schools Withhold Student Rankings
- The iPod Generation
- Synthetic Pets and the Power of Precedent
- Hefty OneZip: A Usability Puzzle
- Intelligent Cross-Sell
- Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders
- User Agreements: Stop the Madness
- BusinessWeek Does the Math
- Review: “All the Shah’s Men” by Steven Kinzer
- Interstellar Magnetic Slinky
- Airborne: Neither Vitamin nor Aspirin
- Product Name-O-Rama
- Microwave Oven Usability
2005
- “Head First” and Zig-Zag Learning
- “Don’t Trash California” Ad
- Opportunities in Image Search
- Thinking About Eating
- Where is the Pets.com of Web 2.0?
- Windows in the Rearview Mirror
- By and Largely Smaller
- The Flaw of Averages
- Follow the Money with “Where Is George”
- Frequent Flyer Cards Keep Airlines Alive
- Professional-Services Firms as Sales Channels
- Anchor from the Eye of Destruction
- Richard Branson, Analyst
- Livening Up Asexual-Fungus Research
- When the Means Become the Ends
- Word of the Day: Deroach
- War on the Wane?
- Costing Out Email’s Manifest Destiny
- “The Search” by John Batelle
- Bubble Calibration Instrument
- Naming In Need Of Taming
- Weather Entrepreneurs
- My Freakonomics Encounter
- Attention Trust, Clickstreams, and the Meaning-Mining Problem
- Rogue Bloggers and Double Agents
- Google Playing Clickstream Catch-Up
- Harvesting Power from Human Motion: Small to Large Scale?
- Companies as Products
- Consumer Apps for Real-Time Biofeedback
- High-Definition Lettuce
- It’s Like Golf But with a Shotgun
- CNET Content Solutions (and Me)
- ExactChoice: The Two-Minute History
- Personify Retrospective
- SRI iVALS Program
- SRI Media Futures Program
- Catching Up